Writing Quotes

When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again.

~ Preston Sturges

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

~ Gustave Flaubert

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

~ Gustave Flaubert

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

~ Toni Morrison

I just want my stories to be mine.

~ Lidia Yuknavitch

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is:Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out.And if you have no such friend,--and you want to write,--well, then you must imagine one.

~ Brenda Ueland

If you have not done things worthy of being written about, at least write things worthy of being read.

~ Giacomo Casanova

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary

~ Pat Conroy

I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us.

~ David Farland

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

~ Haruki Murakami

If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.

~ Billie Holiday

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.

~ Julio Cortázar

A good book will pull you in from the beginning and take you on a journey you'll never forget.

~ Lauren Hammond

Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right.

~ Amy Joy

Writer's block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something. Why? If you have something to say, then say it. If not, enjoy the silence while it lasts. The noise will return soon enough.

~ Hugh Macleod

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.

~ Flannery O'connor

…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….

~ A.s. Byatt

Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant)

~ Isaac Babel

In Hollywood, no one knows anything.

~ William Goldman

Writing is like going underwater - thank you for being there when I come back up.

~ Ali Shaw

It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.

~ Khaled Hosseini

If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

~ Alice Walker

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

~ David Almond

Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes.

~ Israel Shenker

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.

~ E.m. Forster

Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.

~ Stephen King

We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own. We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and meditation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance.We should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living. Writing is sensual, experiential, grounding. We should write because writing is good for the soul. We should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in. We should write, above all, because we are writers, whether we call ourselves that or not.

~ Julia Cameron

I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.

~ Haruki Murakami

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge… It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it.

~ Julio Cortázar

Writing is prayer.

~ Franz Kafka

I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

~ Irwin Shaw

I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.

~ Tiffany Madison

The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by how much kids long to see themselves in stories. To see their identities and perspectives—their avatars—on the page. Not as issues to be addressed or as icons for social commentary, but simply as people who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. Yes, all the “issue” books are great and have a place in literature, but it's a different and wildly joyous gift to find yourself on the pages of an entertainment, experiencing the thrills and chills of a world more adventurous than our own.And when you see that as a writer, you quickly realize that you don't want to be the jerk who says to a young reader, “Sorry, kid. You don't get to exist in story; you're too different.” You don't want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they could have a story written about them, too. That's the role of the bad guy in the dystopian stories, right? Given a choice, I'd rather be the storyteller who says every kid can have a chance to star.

~ Paolo Bacigalupi

a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.

~ Roland Smith

My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.

~ Isabel Allende